Material-cutting processing based on laser technologies has become a mature commercially available technique, and numeral control laser processing systems are widely applied for rectangular metallic plates. With the flourishing development of laser technologies, the methods for plate processing can be applied with a higher speed and versatility. However, higher demands are proposed on automatic feeding and discharging as well as high-tempo continuous production. Decoiling laser-cutting processing for coil materials is under research and gradual application, for example, a conveyor system for laser-cutting processing of a coiled material is disclosed in Chinese patent CN 102281986A. In that system, two series of conveyors and a plurality of parallel supporting conveyors included are used to support strip-like profiles, and at the same time a laser head moving back and forth along a longitudinal axis of a crossbeam member processes the coil so as to obtain sheets. The supporting conveyors can avoid the cutting path, allowing the laser head to cut through the raw materials for acquiring a cut profile. This significantly remedy and solve the problems of the inability to cut the coils, the avoidance of the cutting path for a needle-like cutting table, and the resultant fallen scraps, and has become a novel method for sheet processing in place of mould blanking for coils. The method avoids the requirement of the stamping tonnage for a high-strength material and reduces the high mould design and maintenance costs. In addition, the method based on laser-cutting of coils also contributes greatly to the increase in the material utilisation rate.
In order to process the material in coils, the function of decoiling and straightening needs to be provided in an early stage of the production process, which requires a decoiling machine, a feeding clamp, a remnant cutter, a movable sleeve, and a feeding machine, causing a bulky production line, high investment and relatively low flexibility due to an additional preparation time for decoiling during the processing. Moreover, the tempo of laser-cutting itself usually cannot catch up with the high speed of decoiling and feeding, so that the waiting time in the production line is long.
It would be a convenient and cost-efficient method to feed the materials in blocks and process same with laser. However, a commonly used numeral laser cutter employs a needle-like table, leading to the problem of low cutting quality and inability to automatically separate out scraps of irregular shapes due to the interferences between the laser-cutting path and the needle-like table. Therefore, the processing method has the problem of a low automation efficiency, and its processing manner of combined manual and semi-automatic operations cannot fulfil the requirement of massive processing for millions of pieces. In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, a pad template with modules provided on a crossbeam is disclosed in Chinese patent application No. 201310157659.3, which also discloses new methods for supporting and carrying materials but has a low flexibility of online dynamic adjustment.